


Nathan from a disability perspective

by Hagar



Series: Hagar's Haven Meta [1]
Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Alexithymia, Depression, Disability, Episode: s01e13 Spiral, Episode: s02e11 Business As Usual, Gen, Meta, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 18:04:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2702201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hagar/pseuds/Hagar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An attempt to describe Nathan's ability to relate to other persons, and assess relevant disabilities he may have as a result of his Trouble and early childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nathan from a disability perspective

**Author's Note:**

> Not a healthcare professional, and not saying a word about any experience I have (in my own body, with loved ones or with colleagues) in life with relevant disabilities. If you think I'm being ableist do call me out (and I seriously mean this), but if I think you're apologizing for abusive behavior I am not likely to be kind about it.
> 
> This meta composed with help from antongarou.

######  1\. Working Definitions 

**Selfishness vs. self-centeredness.** Selfishness is not caring for the needs and wants of others, for their existence as subjects separate of oneself. That’s pretty much a bad and we’ll leave it at that. A selfish person doesn’t care; a self-centered one does (or in some cases _think_ they do) but botches up the execution. An example of well-meaning self-centeredness is that person who sees you’re upset, is genuinely concerned, and proceeds to do something that would’ve made _them_ happy but is useless for you. If you’re looking at this and thinking “child”, you’re not wrong: there’s a significant skill component to not being self-centered, and this skill is age-dependent - it usually doesn’t start showing before age 12 or so and doesn’t fully mature until one’s 30s. A behavior that’s positively endearing in a 4yr old might be considered atrocious in an adult, because we have different expectations regarding the function-level of the two.

  1. Blameworthiness is to be reasonably responsible for some bad action. Just because a person did something doesn’t mean they’re meaningfully responsible for it, or for what’s bad about it. My default go-to example is a person with a bad major depressive flare or an active full-blown panic episode. Holding a person in a situation like that blameworthy for their actions in the same way one would ordinarily do is not reasonable. Moreover, it’s cruel.



**Blameworthiness and disability.** The above is also true for some cognitive or social disabilities - but with modifications. Consider a person with ADD. Expecting that person to have the same memory for details as a regular person is not reasonable and moreover (to the degree the person is held blameworthy for it) cruel. ADD is not a moral deficiency. _However,_ a person with ADD who has or had reasonable access to support/therapeutic resources can and _should_ be expected to develop coping skills so as to facilitate their interaction with the world. (I’m specifying access to relevant resources because that’s a privilege not necessarily accessible by all who could benefit from it; holding a person blameworthy for the results of them being underprivileged is, again, cruel.) Not expecting a person with disability to be like a person without disability is not the same thing as giving a person with disability (and-reasonable-access-to-resources) a pass on being responsible for themselves. (Some disabilities affect one’s ability to be responsible to oneself, but I’m restricting this discussion to those that don’t.)

 **Doing vs. being.** Having done something bad doesn’t by itself make a person bad. (I’m going to be using the words “do” and “behave” in a similar sense.) “You’re a bad person” and “You behaved badly” are two different statements. The difference is, briefly, identification and pattern. If it’s pointed out to a person that they’ve done something bad, and they respond with appropriate attitudes (e.g. regret, concern) and move to repair the damage and prevent further repeats of the bad behavior, they’re not a bad person. If it’s pointed out to a person that they did something bad and their response is to attack the person (famously on tumblr: “That was racist.” “I’m not a racist how dare you call me a racist!”) - well, they just chose to identify with their bad action and to deny its badness, so that’s grounds to consider they may be a bad person. _Pattern_ also plays because if a person keeps apologizing but also keeps doing the bad thing? That’s a problem.

 **Abuse.** Abusers apologize then do the bad thing again. Abusers get insulted and hurt that you called the thing they did abusive (see above on tumblr’s racists) and will try and make it the other person’s fault (“Well I’d listen to what you have to say if you weren’t so horrible about how you said it!”). _But,_ things get real messy when we add disability into the mix. Let’s get one thing clear: people with disabilities suffer disproportionately from abuse, including people with cognitive and social disabilities. People with disabilities are vulnerable, and they suffer from abuse far more often than they cause it. That said,having a disability is not by itself an excuse to behave badly; see two paragraphs above. Chronic pain is a nightmare unimaginable to people who don’t have it, but it’s not a license to behave abusively to other people. If you have a person with a disability in your life and they keep doing things that hurt you (or others), you need to seriously assess whether you’re being ablist, they’re behaving abusively, or all of you are failing at managing said disability. (Same if you’re the person with the disability and other people keep complaining about you: are they behaving abusively or are you being irresponsible?)

 **Self-centeredness.** To the degree that self-centeredness may be the result of a disability or a developmental lack (e.g. it can be a symptom in survivors of some kinds of childhood abuse), blameworthiness for it needs to be assessed. If you’re dealing with an adult person with no abuse in their background and no relevant disabilities and they’re self-centered, do yourself a favor and kick them out of your life.

######  2\. Nathan from a disability perspective 

Nathan has abuse in his background, and I’m going to make the case that he has multiple relevant disabilities stemming from his Trouble.

Human brains construct a sense of self from bodily sensations. (Brain circuitry for anything abstract run off brain circuitry for something concrete.) Nathan’s Trouble affect half the relevant circuitry (tactile) but leaves the other half (proprioception) unaffected. Nathan’s Trouble had been active in his childhood, _we don’t know for how long._ We know it was gone by the time he was 8-9, but it may have easily been active for 2-3yr prior. That’s young enough that developmental damage should be seriously considered. The adult episode is probably also fucking him up, but that’s closer to the chronic pain model; the childhood episode may have literally reshaped his brain.

There’s seriously not enough good-enough brain science to try and get a hi-res idea of what the childhood episode damage may look like, but the general lines are this: it’s entirely possible Nathan’s sense of self is fucked up from the wiring, and a human person’s ability to imagine the minds of others and properly relate to them _very much_ relies on sense-of-self. Or in other words, the damage Nathan is likely to have is likely to also affect his ability to relate to others. The damage is also going to negatively affect Nathan in another way: he may have alexhithymia (inability to recognize or properly feel emotions), specifically relating to painful emotions such as fear, distress and mental anguish. His ability to relate to  other persons will be particularly hampered with regards to these emotions: he’d be better at understanding the way joy affects another person than the way grief does.

Nathan’s Trouble-related disability shares dimensions with autistic spectrum disorders. I am _not_ arguing that Nathan has a spectrum disorder: though there’s some overlap in symptoms, the mechanisms driving them are significantly different. (Specifically the disruption to the sense of self.)

There are two more factors that should be considered: one of these relates to Nathan’s Trouble and the other does not. The former is inter-generational transfer of trauma. The effects of trauma are transferable in families: this is part behavioral (messed up parents -> higher likelihood of messed-up child) and part biological (stress changes the expression of DNA in heritable ways; this sort of effect is called “epigenetic”). Between the neurodevelopmental effects of this Trouble and the prevalence of violence in pre- and early Modern society, there’s a significant chance that epigenetic factors are in play with Nathan’s line, even disregarding the 8 years during which he had been raised by (strongly suggested to have been physically abusive, known to be psychologically abusive) Max Hansen.

The factor that does not relate to Nathan’s Trouble is that as of season 02 he’s been showing signs of depression, and as of later seasons (03 or 04, take your pick) his depression has been decidedly severe. Depression absolutely can and _does_ affect one’s ability to plan, make decisions and relate to others in ways that constitute a disability. This point will be important in assessing Nathan’s behavior in the next section, as pre- and in-depression behavior should be assessed differently.

######  3\. Assessing Blameworthiness 

**Nathan is canonically self-centered.** He means well; he’s clearly not selfish. But he’s got real problems with self-centeredness. He tries to comfort other people with things that comfort him, and shows no learning. He’ll dismiss and erase other people’s (completely legitimate) concerns because he cannot grasp those, and he’s most prone to doing this to loved ones. Variant of the last one: he’ll try to offer his contentment as a solution to other’s dissatisfaction. (The “Because I love you” attitude with Audrey.) He’s also seriously blind to his own privilege in Haven (family socioeconomic comfortable, father in good standing in the community) and to the difference of experience in people who are (relative to him) underprivileged; a _lot_ of his fuck-ups have to do with this.

The way Nathan treats Duke is abusive. (Statement on behavior, not character.) It’s a stable and consistent enough pattern I’ll make that statement. The way Nathan treats Audrey started shading into this. I’m a lot more concerned with the former than the latter, on the basis that the latter seems to be stemming more out of depression-distress and everything that fed into this depression crisis. Nathan’s been running major depression going entirely untreated (from July or November 2010 to July 2011; some of the situations in S4 at the very least border on him being abused for it. Holding him blameworthy for shit he’s doing out of depression-related distress is completely fucking pointless. So I’m pretty much willing to write Nathan a pass on borderline-abusive behaviors with Audrey, and we’re going to not talk about Duke because if I take that one apart and label it it’s going to be incredibly ugly. Suffice to say, Nathan’s plenty capable of behaving abusively and he absolutely _does._

 **Assessing blameworthiness.** Behaving abusively is not the same thing as being an abuser. The question here is not whether Nathan has a relevant disability; he probably does. The question is what’s the reasonable level of function that can be expected from him, and what’s the appropriate response to things he can’t be expected to not fuck up. (Someone being disabled is no reason to suffer abuse from them; ostracising someone for their disability is not okay, either. It’s a negotiation and it’s complicated and messy.)

Things working in his favor is that he had an undisrupted, privileged in almost every meaningful way life from age 8 to his 30s. He was raised by a father who by all accounts was _great_ at the “imagining other people’s perspectives” thing (or Garland wouldn’t have had the respect he had and wouldn’t have been able to hold the community together as he manifestly did), and by a mother who - based on her husband’s and son’s reactions - was probably pretty good, too.

I can locate two things working against him. One is that I don’t think anybody understood his situation in terms of developmental disorder disability, plus the resources available during his childhood (1980s, rural maine) were limited. In this respect, Nathan was entirely unprivileged. The prevalent norms of masculinty would’ve been the opposite of helpful, as well: the presentation of alexhithymia might’ve been praised as natural emotional reserve, and he wouldn’t have been corrected for failing to behave empathetically.

Is holding Nathan _blameworthy_ for the abusive things he does appropriate? As much as I hate to say it (and I do), I don’t that that he is. There’s just too many factors in play. He probably _can’t_ be expected to behave by normal-person standards; I personally would like to see the depression addressed before any attempts to correct behavior. That said, I also don’t think that Nathan is safe for other persons. The question of how to address his being cruel to others without being cruel to him - well, that’s messy and complicated in real life, too, and I don’t have any good answers here.

 


End file.
